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After having bad experiences with a few seo and ppc companies, I would like to find a company that operates on the premise that they should get paid for producing results instead just for signing a contract. I'm not thinking that any payment is contingent results but that a large portion of the billing is. I also know that it can take several months to get to an seo goal so I'm not taking a "you have one month to fix our site or we don't pay" approach. Is there a company out there that has enough confidence in their white-hat processes that they actually back their services with some sort of guarantee?

Back in August we got a manual penalty lifted by Google for spammy links that we never created. This had been affecting us for almost a year. For about six weeks our traffic bounced back up to pre-penalty levels - between 60 and 120% greater a day from Google search traffic. Since then, our Google organic traffic has decayed to the point where yesterday we were back below our penalty level and we don't have a new penalty. Can anyone give me some advice about what may have caused this? Link to our site.

I get daily Google alerts for our site and a competitor's site. I have noticed that I am getting multiple alerts a day from Google about products and product categories on the competitor's site. Every now and then there's an actual alert for a linking blog post or something else. How is Google noticing new product on this site but has never done the same for ours? Is there some kind of strategy involved here that I don't know about? The site is http://bit.ly/Q0o2ob

In June '12 we got a bunch of our keyword rankings wacked by Panda 3.7 and haven't recovered. This is really frustrating since we had been hit by the original Panda and spent months fixing our site so that we had recovered in December '11. I've read what I can find about this update to see if there is something specific about it that would have knocked us down again and can't find anything. Does anyone know of any specific issues that this update supposedly "fixed"?

So a couple of weeks ago I posted that we had submitted a reconsideration request along with a list of about 40 spam pages that were linking to us that we had attempted to have remove their links to us. On 8/3 we received a note from Google that our manual penalty had been removed. We have thousands of inbound links so these 40 pages were a minuscule part of our links and ones that we hadn't tried to get in the first place. So I thought "Great, our rankings should go up." Up until this point our year-to-year organic Google traffic was  between 45% and 100% over last year. As of 8/9 our traffic is now only 26%-39% above last year. I don't think we can handle too many more penalty reversals like this one.

Today I was plugging the SEOMoz Google change log into my analytics and noticed that our site took an impression jump (30%) on the day Panda 3.8 was released but also, if I'm reading the chart right, a drop in keyword avg. ranking. Does this make any sense or am I misunderstanding the chart? googleseomozq.jpg

If anyone doesn't think that spam sabotage is possible, here is proof. In February we received a suspicious spammy link notice and penalty from Google. We did several things to try and fix the problem including getting old links from not very relevant sites removed and submitted, and were denied, reconsideration twice. On the advice of Billy here on the forum, we went through the bottom end of our inbound links through OSE and found about forty domains that had linked to us and were purely trash sites full of link spam. We filed another reconsideration request listing every one of these sites along with dates we tried to contact the site owner (almost always impossible) to delete links to our site and two weeks later we received a note back that the manual penalty had been lifted. My question now is, from your experience, how long does it take to notice a recovery from this penalty? This experience also has me concerned that site sabotage is actually pretty simple when you can plant garbage links from 40 sites, many of which are the same with different urls, and get someone penalized on Google.

So last December we saw our hard work pay off as our Panda penalty was lifted and our traffic shot back up to pre-Panda levels. Then in February we received this note: We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. Since December we've lost position on 80% of our top 100 keywords. I've gone through our links and can't figure out what the problem may be. Maybe I'm not using OSE properly. We don't buy links so I'm not sure what the problem is. If someone can walk me through using OSE to see what the problem may be I would appreciate it. Our domain is http://bit.ly/rbkYkp

So I went to look at our keyword reports in GA today and our most popular keyword was "(not provided)". It now accounts for 10% of our referred visits. Unfortunately, it also has a 125% avg order value compared to the rest of our site. This is a really annoying policy that Google has implemented and will clearly have an effect on our ability to effectively market our site.

I just wanted to say thank you all for the advice you've given on this board. When I first joined we had been stomped by Panda three times and our traffic was down about 40% from last year. Since then, we've followed recommendations here and while we aren't quite back to where we were before, our traffic for the last three days from Google is higher than any time since May and trending higher. We are also up in Google rank for 70% of our tracked keywords and showing up for 15% that we weren't even on the radar for in August. We still have a lot of work to do but know that we are on the right track. We can now do the same on a site that survived the initial hit but got slapped in July. I just want to reiterate what others have said: Get rid of duplicate urls - 301 redirect all dups to a single page Flesh out or drop pages with low content value Find 404 pages that used to exist and instead of 404s, 301 redirect to current resources Fix speed issues This forum was well worth the subscription.

Two weeks ago we changed our urls so the correct addresses are all lowercase. Everything else 301 redirects to those. We have submitted and made sure that Google has downloaded our updated sitemap several times since. Even so, Webmaster Tools is reporting 33000 + errors in our sitemap for urls that are no longer in our sitemap and haven't been for weeks. It claims to have found the errors within the last couple of days but the sitemap has been updated for a couple of weeks and has been downloaded by Google at least three times since. Here is our sitemap: http://www.aquinasandmore.com/urllist.xml Here are a couple of urls that Webmaster Tools says are in the sitemap: http://www.aquinasandmore.com/catholic-gifts/Caroline-Gerhardinger-Large-Sterling-Silver-Medal/sku/78664
Redirect error unavailable
Oct 7, 2011
http://www.aquinasandmore.com/catholic-gifts/Catherine-of-Bologna-Small-Gold-Filled-Medal/sku/78706
Redirect error unavailable
Oct 7, 2011

When trying to browse the results using the "group by domain" filter in OSE, when you click on the next page or one of the page numbers the results go back to the ungrouped list.

Okay, I've read the posts by Google about the new prev, next tags  and the suggestion for using a view all option. I've also read the posts here on SEOMoz on the topic but none of them quite address what we have. First, Some of our  main categories are very large (over 6000 pieces of jewelry) so a view all option would take forever to load be completely useless to a visitor. Second, our category home pages provide (here's an example😞 A description of the category with links to important sections and articles A row of new items A dozen of the popular items from the category. Links to related articles if applicable. So we have a real category home page with content instead of just categories that start immediately with pages of product. Should we set the canonical url for all of the browse pages to the main category page, create a view all page or just use the next and previous rel tags with the category home pages as the first in the series?

Google webmaster tools has a warning for our site map saying that this url (and a couple of others) have a 301 redirect in them. http://www.aquinasandmore.com/catholic-gifts/Immaculate-Heart-of-Mary-Bookmark/sku/59682 I've checked the link and don't see that it actually is redirecting. Any thoughts on why this is popping up?

So I've been wracking my brain about a problem. I had posted earlier about our degrading rank that we haven't been able to arrest. I thought we were doing everything right. Many years ago we had a program that would allow other stores in our niche use our site as a storefront if they couldn't deal with setting up their own site. They would have their own homepage with their own domain but all links from that page would go to our site to avoid duplicate content issues (before I knew about canonical meta tags or before they existed, I don't remember). I just realize that we had dozens of these domains pointing to our site without nofollow meta tags. Is it possible that this pattern looked like we were trying to game Google and have been penalized as some kind of link farm since Panda? I've added nofollow meta tags to these domains. If we were being penalized for this, should this fix the problem?

So I've been wracking my brain about a problem. I had posted earlier about our degrading rank that we haven't been able to arrest. I thought we were doing everything right. Many years ago we had a program that would allow other stores in our niche use our site as a storefront if they couldn't deal with setting up their own site. They would have their own homepage with their own domain but all links from that page would go to our site to avoid duplicate content issues (before I knew about canonical meta tags or before they existed, I don't remember). I just realize that we had dozens of these domains pointing to our site without nofollow meta tags. Is it possible that this pattern looked like we were trying to game Google and have been penalized as some kind of link farm since Panda? I've added nofollow meta tags to these domains. If we were being penalized for this, should this fix the problem?

On an ecommerce site there are typically a lot of pages that may appear to be duplications due to category browse results where the only difference may be the sorting by price or number of products per page. How best to deal with this? Add nofollow to the sorting links? Set canonical values that ignore these variables? Set cononical values that match the category home page? Is this even a possible problem with Panda or spiders in general?

The section for buying your dvd training lists the price for everyone at $119 and the special price for pro members at - $119. Then the text says that the special price will be shown when the item is added to the cart where the special price is - $119. Am I missing something here?

In 2009 we peaked in organic site traffic. During that time we received traffic for 276,000 different keywords. Since then our organic traffic from Google only has fallen almost 45% and our unique keyword traffic has dropped to 195,000. During that time I thought we were doing everything right: We wrote over 300 articles on our site We got on Facebook and started posting regularly. We got on Twitter and tweeted several times a week both about our niche topic and our store We launched a new product review site and took on bloggers as product reviewers The reviews the bloggers write link to our store, the product and some valuable keywords in every post and there have been a couple of hundred written We've done about 20 Youtube videos And yet, here we are with our organic Google traffic down 45%.Alexa has dropped us 200,000 spots. At this point I feel like the house is burning down around me and really don't know where to turn to get this trend reversed. Any suggestions on a clear path forward?